Strategy-dependent causal relationships between large-scale cortical activity and perceptual decisions

In 54 mice performing a sensory-evidence accumulation task, GLM-HMMs identified three strategy states, and frontal cortex inactivation effects depended on whether mice were engaged or biased.

• Why it matters: It remains unclear whether specific cortical regions contribute differently to decisions when animals switch between internally generated strategies.
• What they did: The authors analyzed three datasets using widefield imaging or optogenetic inactivation across dozens of cortical sites, fitting GLM-HMMs and testing how inactivation altered side bias across states.
• The result: During engaged states, inactivation tended to increase side bias, while the opposite occurred in biased states; frontal regions most strongly affected engaged control, and cortex-wide decoding showed frontal choice encoding preferentially in engaged versus biased states.

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